You can lacerate my pointed wing.
I can put my head inside a cloud. Poof.
It is 2002, I remember your last day on earth.
You had Ray-Bans parting your hazel hair.
Everything is cliché, eventually. I remember
your numbing shimmer, your half-life of love.
It was too easy for you. You poked my inactive
cells, this sting of rain, a longer season of growth.
There’s one black mark: the space you left behind.
Even now, I try to prophesy your return.
I offer sweet lies to the red-tailed hawks
and your memory devours me like forest fire.
From: Nelson, Caleb, “Dendrochronology” in Epigraph Magazine, Issue Seventeen, February 2018, p. 10.
(https://www.epigraphmagazine.com/uploads/1/5/6/7/15676572/epigraph_issue_017.pdf)
Date: 2018
By: Caleb Nelson (19??- )
From Troubles of The World 